Named for their bright yellow color, banana slugs aren’t that different from the slugs you might try to keep out of your garden. They belong to the same family of animals, called gastropods, which have no spine and only one foot.

Banana slugs are important members of the redwood forest community, even if they aren’t the most exalted. They eat animal droppings, leaves and other detritus on the forest floor, and then generate waste that fertilizes new plants. Being slugs, they don’t move very quickly, and without a shell, they need other protection to keep themselves from becoming food and then fertilizer. Their main defense: slime.

Banana slugs live on the floors of coastal forests from Santa Cruz, California to Alaska. Thisslug was found in Henry Cowell Redwood State Park after a day of rain.

Slime refers to mucus—the same stuff that coats your nose and lungs—found on the outside of an animal’s body. Banana slug slime contains nasty chemicals that numb the tongue of any animal that attempts to nibble it, discouraging predators like raccoons, who have to go to the trouble of removing the slime if they want to eat the slug. But this is just one of many ways slugs depend on slime, and they use it for everything from locomotion to nutrition.

Slime can absorb up to 100 times its original weight in water. So it helps slugs, which are mostly water, stay moist. It’s also both a great lubricant and a sticky glue, so they can use it to glide over a razor blade or stick to a windowpane. Engineers are fascinated by these dual lubricant/adhesive properties, and would love to learn to make slug slime in the lab.

Slime can be both smooth and sticky, and slugs use it to glide over rough terrain and climb vertical surfaces.

Christopher Viney is one of these engineers. He’s a materials engineer at the University of California, Merced, and a slime expert. Viney has spent years studying its chemical and physical properties, something very few scientists had done before. He and team harvested slime from dozens of banana slugs, which he says are “a very clean, reproducible source of mucus.” They discovered that the slime, which is chemically very similar to human mucus, has special properties that set it apart from other bodily fluids. For one thing, it’s not really a liquid, at least not a conventional one.

Mucus is a liquid crystal, a special physical state somewhere in between a liquid and solid.

Viney discovered that mucus is a liquid crystal, which means it’s somewhere in between the liquid and solid state, as its molecules are more organized than a typical liquid but not as rigidly ordered as a solid. It’s composed of strands of glycoproteins — molecules in which a protein backbone is decorated with carbohydrate side chains — that are semi-ordered, like braided hair, instead of being tangled together randomly like a bowl of spaghetti.

Viney has since moved on to studying spiders and silkworms, but many other engineers, biologists, and even medical doctors are still studying banana slugs. Engineers at MIT tried to copy the unique way slugs and snails move by building a “robo-snail,” which they hoped would be more stable and better able to traverse rough terrain than a robot that walks like a human or moves on wheels.

Anette Hosoi and Brian Chan at MIT made a robot called the “Robosnail” that mimicshow gastropods like slugs and snails move, using foot pads that mimic gastropod foot muscles and synthetic slime.

The robo-snail has foot muscles and even synthetic slime. It can crawl over glass and up walls and ceilings, but it can’t quite achieve the mobility, grace and stickiness that come so effortlessly to slugs and snails. Janice Lai, a graduate student at Stanford University, used a special camera to observe every detail of a banana slug’s muscular movements and to model them, so that the next generation of robot snails and slugs can be a little bit closer to the real thing.

Janet Leonard, a staff scientist, and Brooke Wagner, a former graduate student, both of the University of California-Santa Cruz, have spent a lot of time closely observing banana slugs too, during the slug’s most intimate moments. They study banana slug mating: a long, slimy and occasionally carnivorous ritual (the slugs sometimes eat each other’s penises after mating, and no one really knows why).

Banana slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, and can mate as male or female at any time. Banana slugs penises can be as long as the slug itself, one of the biggest penis:body size ratios in the animal kingdom. Photos: courtesy of Brooke Miller.

Mating rituals are different for each of the three species of banana slugs, but some species spend over four hours on the process: two hours of courtship and two hours of repeated fertilization. After all this time in one place, the couple will be left in a big puddle of slime—which they eat.

“It’s important to recycle those nutrients,” Leonard says. “That time spent mating is expensive.”

The banana slug’s mating behavior, and its slime, have evolved over millions of years. After all this time, the banana slug is very well adapted to the redwood forest environment, scientists say.

Ilaria Mazzoleni at the Southern California School of Architecture, and biologist Shauna Price at UCLA want to capitalize on these millennia of evolution. They say they want to learn from some of the slug’s tricks to create a building that is equally well suited to the redwood environment. With a group of architecture students they built a prototype for a greenhouse with special silicone units that capture and release water, inspired by the banana slug’s mucus secretions.

Southern California Institute of Architecture students Astri A. Bang, Maya Alam, and Janni S. Pedersen, under the guidance of Ilaria Mazzoleni and Shauna Price, created a design for a banana slug inspired greenhouse. They made silicone prototypes of bladders that would encase the building and store and release water, inspired by the slug’s mucus secretions and permeable skin.

Mazzoleni acknowledges that some people, including her own mother, find banana slugs “quite gross.” But she says architecture “is a functional art,” and the banana slug is “a great source of inspiration for that function.”

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2015/02/17/banana-slugs-secret-of-the-slime/feed/137.0220573 -122.053123737.0220573-122.0531237Screen Shot 2015-02-16 at 10.05.12 PMBanana slugs live on the floors of coastal forests from Santa Cruz, California to Alaska. This
slug was found in Henry Cowell Redwood State Park after a day of rain.Slime can be both smooth and sticky, and slugs use it to glide over rough terrain and climb vertical surfaces.Slime can be both smooth and sticky, and slugs use it to glide over rough terrain and climb vertical surfaces.Mucus is a liquid crystal, a special physical state somewhere in between a liquid and solid.Mucus is a liquid crystal, a special physical state somewhere in between a liquid and solid.Anette Hosoi and Brian Chan at MIT made a robot called the “Robosnail” that mimics how gastropods like slugs and snails move, using foot pads that mimic gastropod foot muscles and synthetic slime.Anette Hosoi and Brian Chan at MIT made a robot called the “Robosnail” that mimics
how gastropods like slugs and snails move, using foot pads that mimic gastropod foot muscles and synthetic slime.Banana slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, and can mate as male or female at any time. Banana slugs penises can be as long as the slug itself, one of the biggest penis:body size ratios in the animal kingdom. Photos: courtesy of Brooke Miller.Banana slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, and can mate as male or female at any time. Banana slugs penises can be as long as the slug itself, one of the biggest penis:body size ratios in the animal kingdom. Photos: courtesy of Brooke Miller.Southern California Institute of Architecture students Astri A. Bang, Maya Alam, and Janni S. Pedersen, under the guidance of Ilaria Mazzoleni and Shauna Price, created a design for a banana slug inspired greenhouse. They made silicone prototypes of bladders that would encase the building and store and release water, inspired by the slug’s mucus secretions and permeable skin.Southern California Institute of Architecture students Astri A. Bang, Maya Alam, and Janni S. Pedersen, under the guidance of Ilaria Mazzoleni and Shauna Price, created a design for a banana slug inspired greenhouse. They made silicone prototypes of bladders that would encase the building and store and release water, inspired by the slug’s mucus secretions and permeable skin.The Fantastic Fur of Sea Ottershttp://blogs.kqed.org/science/2015/01/06/the-fantastic-fur-of-sea-otters/
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2015/01/06/the-fantastic-fur-of-sea-otters/#commentsWed, 07 Jan 2015 02:17:09 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/science/?p=25908

California sea otters (Enhydra lutris) — the frolicking mascots of the coast who draw visitors to aquariums in droves and who float among the kelp beds just beyond the surf line — have the densest fur of any mammal on Earth.

With up to a million hairs per inch, the super-soft coats were once such a lure for hunters that they nearly led to the otters’ demise in the early 1900s. But now, the federally protected species is free to use its luxurious fur for one key purpose: to keep warm in the often chilly Pacific Ocean, particularly during winter months.

“They live in cold water, and it’s too cold for them,” says Heather Liwanag, a biologist who studied otter fur as part of her Ph.D. research at U.C. Santa Cruz.

‘If an otter were to use blubber to stay warm the amount of blubber it would need would be bigger than the otter.’— Heather Liwanag,
Adelphi University Biologist

Everywhere in the otter’s geographic range, she says, is outside their “thermal neutral zone.” This zone is the range of temperatures in which a mammal can live without expending energy to maintain its internal body temperature. So how do they do it? The same way you or I would—with a nice warm blanket. But theirs is a blanket of air.

“They’re using fur for insulation, but it’s not really the fur that’s insulating them,” says Liwanag, now an assistant professor of biology at Adelphi University in New York.

The true insulating power comes from a layer of air the fur keeps trapped next to their skin. Otter fur has two special properties that make it especially good at creating an insulating layer of air: It’s dense, and it’s spiky.

Otters fur is about 1,000 times more dense than human hair. But it wouldn’t do them any good if it were smooth and perfectly combed. Otters want their hair as tangled as possible, so that the air bubbles they blow into their pelts can’t get out. This is where the spiky aspect comes in handy.

Otter pelts feel smooth and soft to us, but if you look at otter hair with a microscope you can see that it’s covered in tiny, geometric barbs. The barbs help the hair mat together so tightly that the fur near the otter’s body is almost completely dry. And keeping the animals dry is key to keeping them warm.

There are some disadvantages to the otter’s heating system. Because it relies on the trapped air, otters can’t dive too deep because high pressure forces the bubbles out. Also, the air makes them so buoyant they have to work hard to swim down. They sometimes even need to grab a rock or piece of kelp to help stay submerged.

Their unique use of air bubbles to stay insulated and warm is what makes oil spills so dangerous to otters. Oil can mat down otter fur and keep it from holding air. Without the insulation the otter is left unprotected from the frigid ocean water. It doesn’t take long for oiled otters to succumb to hypothermia and drown.

Many other marine mammals, including whales and sea lions, stay warm a different way — with layers of blubber.

Liwanag, in her thesis research that was published in 2012, compared the insulating powers of fur and blubber under different conditions. She wanted to learn more about how different species of mammals adapted to the marine environment to stay warm.

“Going in to this thesis, I fully expected blubber to be the better insulator,” she says, “because we see it arise multiple times, across different lineages.” But that wasn’t the case, and it turned out that fur—or really, air—is warmer, at least at shallow depths.

“If an otter were to use blubber to stay warm,” Liwanag says, “the amount of blubber it would need would be bigger than the otter.”

There’s something buried in the Arctic soil that could have a huge effect on the future of our planet’s climate. Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have descended on Barrow, Alaska to study permafrost — soil that remains frozen throughout the seasons, often for thousands of years. They’re interested in permafrost because it has the potential to release an enormous amount of greenhouse gases in a short amount of time if rising temperatures cause the permafrost to thaw.

Nearly one quarter of the land in the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere is permafrost, and the decaying plant matter within it contains about twice as much carbon as is presently in the atmosphere.

Susan Hubbard, LBNL’s representative on the NGEE-Arctic project exploring the different types of Arctic vegetation present at the Barrow, AK field site.Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt/LBNL

The Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment – Arctic, is a collaborative project between Lawrence Berkeley Lab and seven other institutions to study this ecosystem in incredible detail. The researchers began work in 2012, and plan to continue their research through 2022.

Craig Ulrich of LBNL collecting imagery of the land surface using sensors mounted on a kite. Photo: Roy Kaltschmidt/LBNL

They aim to combine information from a wide range of techniques – from Electrical Resistance Tomography that measures the soil’s moisture, salinity and texture, to a kite outfitted with a camera that reveals the surface vegetation and topography. By bringing together a variety of techniques, they hope to learn all they can about this one specific location. The team plans to use the knowledge to create more accurate computer models of our planet’s climate, which will allow scientists to better understand how permafrost everywhere will react to changes in temperature.

“The combination of above and below ground geophysical imaging of the Arctic tundra has enabled us to, for the first time, ‘see’ complex interactions occurring between land surface, active layer, and permafrost processes that contribute to carbon cycling,” says Susan Hubbard, Director of the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In order to predict how large swaths of permafrost will react to changing conditions, the researchers must learn exactly what the soils are made of — down to the microscopic level. They need to know where the permafrost is and how deep it goes. They need to know what minerals it contains, including how much water and gas, and what tiny organisms live there.

Drilling permafrost cores in Barrow, AK. Photo: Craig Ulrich/LBNL

One aspect of the project requires the researchers to drill down from the surface and extract long solid cylinders of frozen soil. They ship the frozen samples back to research labs for a battery of tests. At Lawrence Berkeley Lab, they’re using a CT scanner, similar to those found in hospitals, to measure and examine the makeup of the cores, because different substances react differently to changing temperatures.

While the “active layer” near the soil’s surface can freeze each fall and thaw each summer, the permafrost layer further below may stay frozen for thousands of years. Within it lays the remnants of ancient plants and bacteria that have stayed dormant, trapped in the frozen soil. It also contains greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, which are the waste products created by bacteria as they break down the dead plant matter buried in the soil. If the soil thaws, the ancient bacteria will get to work decomposing the plant matter and releasing greenhouse gases.

The extra greenhouse gases could trap heat in the atmosphere, which would in turn thaw more permafrost. This could result in a catastrophic feedback loop that would accelerate the warming of the planet. Another possibility is that a warming climate might create longer growing seasons in the summer, which would allow more plants to grow at the surface. As the plants grow, they could trap more carbon out of the atmosphere.

In addition to its vast size, the Arctic tundra is also extremely complex. The different geological features make it difficult to predict how the large swaths of land will react to warming, researchers say. Current models suggest that between 7 percent and 90 percent of permafrost may thaw by the year 2100. That wide range shows that scientists need to gain a more detailed understanding of the systems at play in order to achieve more precise predictions about the future.

By studying the composition and texture of sand, geologists can reconstruct its incredible life history. “There’s just a ton of information out there, and all of it is in the sand,” said Mary McGann, a geologist at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA.

McGann recently took part in a comprehensive research project mapping sand’s journey into and throughout San Francisco Bay.

Patrick Barnard, another USGS geologist who helped oversee the project, said that it will help scientists understand how local beaches are changing over time. In particular, Barnard wants to understand why beaches just south of San Francisco Bay are among the most rapidly eroding beaches in the state.

“It comes down to sand,” he said. “Where does the sand supply come from to these beaches, and is it being cut off?”

Daniel Hoover of the USGS and Brenda Goeden of the SF Bay Conservation and Development Commission collect sand samples along the open coast of Drakes Bay in California. (Amy Foxgrover/USGS)

From 2010-2012, Barnard and his team sampled beaches, outcrops, rivers and creeks to track sand’s journey around the bay. They even collected sand from the ocean floor. The researchers then carefully analyzed the samples to characterize the shapes, sizes, and chemical properties of the sand grains.

Barnard said the information provides a kind of fingerprint, or signature, for each sample that can then be matched to a potential source. For example, certain minerals may only come from the Sierra Mountains or the Marin Headlands.

“If we’ve covered all of the potential sources, and we know the unique signature of the sand from these different sources, and we find it on a beach somewhere, then we basically know where it came from,” explained Barnard.

Jeff Hansen and Daniel Hoover of the USGS get ready to send a “sand grab” into San Pablo Bay to collect sand samples from the ocean floor. (Amy Foxgrover/USGS)

But sometimes this geological information isn’t enough.

“Sometimes it’s difficult to say where sand comes from,” said McGann. “Sometimes it’s distinct and comes from different watersheds and people know it. Sometimes it’s not obvious at all.”

McGann studies tiny ocean-dwelling organisms called forams and diatoms, which can provide additional information about how sand travels. Because these critters prefer to live in very specific environments, their location can offer clues about how ocean currents transport material.

McGann has found marine diatoms near Pittsburg, in Honker Bay, and ocean floor-dwelling forams near the Dumbarton Bridge. “They wouldn’t normally live there,” she said. “There’s no way those things would live there. It shows us that there’s a pathway.”

And those species aren’t the only things finding their way into the sand. Manmade materials can show up there, too. McGann has found metal welding scraps and tiny glass spheres (commonly sprinkled on highways to make road stripes reflective) in sand samples from around the bay.

A single foram sits on the “W” of a penny. (Mary McGann/USGS)

“All of these things can get washed into our rivers or our creeks, or washed off the road in storm drains,” explained McGann. “Eventually they end up in, for example, San Francisco Bay.”

By piecing together all of these clues – the information found in the minerals, biological material and manmade objects that make up sand – the researchers ended up with a pretty clear picture of how sand travels around San Francisco Bay.

Some sands stay close to home. Rocky sand in the Marin Headlands comes from nearby bluffs, never straying far from its source.

Other sands travel hundreds of miles. Granite from the Sierra Nevada mountains careens down rivers and streams on a century-long sojourn to the coast.

In fact, much of the sand in the Bay Area comes from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, with local watersheds also playing an important role in transporting sand to the beach.

Barnard said he hopes this research will help Californians realize that the sand they enjoy at the beach has to travel through inland rivers and watersheds to arrive at the coast. By mining and constructing dams, residents could be cutting off sand sources and compromising the sustainability of local beaches, he said.

“Ultimately we’re potentially cutting off a supply of sand, which is what makes these beaches we enjoy wide to provide storm protection and recreational use,” said Barnard.

Although this project focused on San Francisco Bay, the same techniques could be used to study other coastal systems, he added, revealing the incredible life stories of sand from around the world.

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/11/04/the-amazing-life-of-sand/feed/037.7938842 -122.485327737.7938842-122.4853277Hoover and GoedenDaniel Hoover of the USGS and Brenda Goeden of the SF Bay Conservation and Development Commission collect sand samples along the open coast of Drakes Bay in California. (Amy Foxgrover/USGS)Sand GrabJeff Hansen and Daniel Hoover of the USGS get ready to send a “sand grab” into San Pablo Bay to collect sand samples from the ocean floor. (Amy Foxgrover/USGS)ForamA single foram sits on the “W” of a penny. (Mary McGann/USGS)Pygmy Seahorses: Masters of Camouflagehttp://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/10/21/pygmy-seahorses-masters-of-camouflage/
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/10/21/pygmy-seahorses-masters-of-camouflage/#commentsTue, 21 Oct 2014 13:00:17 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/science/?p=22700

Over the summer, biologists from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco returned from an expedition to the Philippines with some very rare and diminutive guests, a mating pair of pygmy seahorses. The two tiny fish, each shorter than an inch and bright orange, were collected as part of a larger study of the stunning biodiversity found in the “Twilight Zone” of the ocean. It’s a relatively unexplored environment located at depths where the bright tropical sunlight barely penetrates.

Pygmy seahorses live their entire adult lives attached to a type of coral called a Gorgonian sea fan. The seahorses use their long tails to grab on to the delicately branched sea fans. But what’s really amazing is their ability to match the coral’s bright color and knobby texture. They blend in so perfectly that they are barely visible, even to a trained eye.

More people have walked on the moon than have seen a juvenile land on a sea fan.

Pygmy seahorses are nearly impossible to raise in captivity. More people have walked on the moon than have seen a juvenile land on a sea fan. Until recently, there was no record of the seahorses ever living long enough to breed in an aquarium. As a result, very little is known about them, making them extremely attractive to researchers eager to learn about the mysterious species.

One of the biggest hurdles is keeping the host sea fans alive, since the pygmy sea horses cannot live without them. Biologists Matt Wandell and Rich Ross knew this would be tough, but they had been preparing since 2011 when Bart Shepherd, Director of the Steinhart Aquarium, issued them a challenge. They were tasked with keeping the sea fans alive for three years before they could even attempt bring back the seahorses.

Matt Wandell inspects the tank used to house the first generation of pygmy seahorses at The California Academy of Sciences (Sally Schilling/KQED)

The Gorgonian sea fan is itself an animal, distantly related to jellyfish and anemones, and is very difficult to raise in tanks. But these seahorses cannot live without the them. So the team became experts in raising small sections of the brightly colored coral. They even came up with a custom-tailored mix to feed the sea fans, consisting of baby brine shrimp, copepods, and oyster reproductive organs. By 2014, the captive sea fans were thriving. The team was ready to go back to the Philippines and bring back their treasured new tenants, a carefully selected mating pair of pygmy seahorses.

Having located the species on a previous expedition, it took the group of divers, biologists and aquarists less than 36 hours to gently collect the pygmy seahorses and transport them to the other side of the world. From the bottom of the ocean, the seahorses would now spend their days in a small tank at the Steinhart Aquarium, housed within the California Academy of Sciences. The tiny travelers immediately made themselves at home grasping onto the long waiting sea fans. But then something amazing happened: the sea horses gave birth. Like other seahorses, it is the male pygmy that rears the offspring in his brood pouch, re-releasing groups of offspring every two weeks.

Juvenile pygmy seahorses swim well and it is during this time that they venture away from the host sea fan to find new places to live. As they mature, they settle down and find a sea fan to call home. How exactly they find the sea fan has yet to be discovered.

Over the course of several months, the Cal Academy biologists were searching for the answer to an elusive question: Are pygmy seahorses born certain colors, or do they change colors as they find sea fans of the same color? The answer, captured in this “Deep Look” video, may surprise you.

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/10/21/pygmy-seahorses-masters-of-camouflage/feed/137.7698646 -122.466094737.7698646-122.4660947Matt_Wandel_Pygmy-Seahorses_800x450Matt Wandell inspects the tank used to house the first generation of pygmy seahorses at The California Academy of Sciences (Sally Schilling/KQED)Josh Cassidy films pygmy seahorsesJosh Cassidy film pygmy seahorses at The California Academy of Sciences (Sally Schilling/KQED)New Devil’s Slide Trail Opens to the Public on Thursdayhttp://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/03/25/new-devils-slide-trail-opens-to-the-public-on-thursday/
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/03/25/new-devils-slide-trail-opens-to-the-public-on-thursday/#commentsWed, 26 Mar 2014 01:19:48 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/science/?p=15811

Drivers have long been tempted to steal a quick glimpse of the rugged Northern California coastline below Highway 1, but with the opening of the new Devil’s Slide Trail visitors will be encouraged to stop and take it all in. This Thursday, San Mateo County Parks will open the new multi-use trail to the public, giving new life to the once-treacherous stretch of highway.

The trail features a fantastic array of wildlife and stunning views of the coast. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)

Since its opening in 1937, this strip of Highway 1 was notorious for its dangerous driving conditions and susceptibility to landslides. In 2013 Caltrans completed two 4,200-foot-long tunnels bypassing the worst section. That provided the opportunity to create this trail out of the unused strip of highway.

Members of the Devil’s Slide Trail Ambassador Program will work with park staff to provide safety observations and visitor information. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)

“It’s really a fun walk,” said Don Traeger of Woodside, who was out walking his chocolate lab, Maverick. Traeger has been been a volunteer for San Mateo County Parks for over a year, and had early access to the trail. “After having driven it for so long, to finally just walk it and see all the things we miss because the road was so intense to drive.”

Don Traeger says his dog Maverick always wants to jump over the rail because it’s so interesting on the other side. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)

“I just can’t wait until this trail opens and I get to see people enjoying Devil’s Slide,” said Marlene Finley, the San Mateo County Parks director. “Every time I’ve been out here I find that I want to stay longer than I’ve planned. We saw whales in December; we’ve seen dolphins.” And there are peregrine falcons nesting nearby, too, she added.

A researcher monitors nesting shorebirds from a peak above the new Devil’s Slide Trail. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)

The 1.3-mile trail is open to pedestrians, bicyclists, equestrians and dogs on leashes. It’s handicapped-accessible. There is no fee to visit and parking is available in lots at either end of the trail.

A bicyclist cruises along the Devil’s Slide Trail. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/03/25/new-devils-slide-trail-opens-to-the-public-on-thursday/feed/3DevilSlide-JoshC-5010The new Devil's Slide Trail replaces a treacherous stretch of Highway 1. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)DevilSlide-JoshC-4968The trail features a fantastic array of wildlife and stunning views of the coast. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)DevilSlide-JoshC-5098Members of the Devil's Slide Trail Ambassador Program will work with park staff to provide safety observations and visitor information. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)DevilSlide-JoshC-5119Don Traeger says his dog Maverick always wants to jump over the rail because it's so interesting on the other side. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)DevilSlide-JoshC-4996A researcher monitors nesting shorebirds from a peak above the new Devil's Slide Trail. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)DevilSlide-JoshC-5088A bicyclist cruises along the Devil's Slide Trail. (Josh Cassidy/KQED)Predatory Plant: Lure of the Cobra Lilyhttp://blogs.kqed.org/science/video/predatory-plant-lure-of-the-cobra-lily/
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/video/predatory-plant-lure-of-the-cobra-lily/#commentsMon, 03 Mar 2014 18:29:59 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/science/?post_type=videos&p=12317

The cobra lily (Darlingtonia californica) is a patient and devious predatory plant native to Northern California and Southern Oregon. Also called the California pitcher plant, it has evolved an astonishing set of adaptations that allow it to trap, kill and digest its animal prey using highly modified pitcher-shaped leaves. But what would make a plant select a diet of insect meat?

“It seems strange to us that a plant can be carnivorous,” said Barry Rice, a botanist at the University of California, Davis Center for Plant Diversity. “We’ve gotten used to what we think of as a natural order of things, where people and animals eat plants, not the other way around.”

Butterfly Valley, located Plumas Nationa Forest, is one of the only protected cobra lily habitats. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQED.

But Butterfly Valley Botanical Area is a place where the tables are turned. Located in Plumas National Forest, about 150 miles northeast of Sacramento, Butterfly Valley is home to the Darlingtonia bog. More accurately described as a fen, this wetland is home to some amazing carnivorous plants. The combination of cold, slow moving water, nutrient-poor soils and bright sun provide the perfect conditions for cobra lilies to thrive.

The cobra lily uses nectar to lure insects into its pitcher traps. Photo by Phi Tran.

Drudging through the soggy fen recently, Rice said: “In habitats like this, where there are very few nutrients, carnivorous plants act as the top predator of the ecosystem. And they’ll eat just about anything they can lure into them.”

The plants entice insects into their pitcher-shaped traps with an offering of sugary nectar on their long leafy fangs. Insects that land on the plants gorge on the nectar, which leads them to the cobra lillies’ downward facing openings.

The entrance to the cobra lily’s pitcher trap is curled inwards making it easy for insects to enter, but difficult for them to find the exit once inside. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQED.

Once inside a cobra lily, insects become confused by the light shining down through the transparent windows — called fenestrations — at the top of the chamber. Insects are drawn to light, but the false exits only serve to confuse and tire the plant’s prey. The entrance to the pitcher curls into the chamber obscuring the only way out.

After buzzing around within the chamber and repeatedly slamming into the fenestrations, some unlucky insects fall or crawl down into the pitcher’s descending tube. The tube is lined with tiny downward facing hairs to discourage the insects from crawling back up to safety.

Exhausted, the insects eventually drown in the puddle of fluid at the bottom of the pitcher. Symbiotic midge larvae and bacteria living in the fluid, assist the cobra lily in digesting the doomed bugs. The plant then absorbs the nutrients through cells that line the inside of the pitcher tube, much the same way that roots absorb nutrients and water from the soil.

Carnivorous plants like the cobra lily still collect energy from the sun. But plants also require nutrients, and not all habitats have ideal nutrients in the soil. Carnivorous plants have evolved an alternative method of absorbing the essential nutrients. Instead of depending entirely on their roots to draw nitrogen and phosphorus up from the soil, carnivorous plants can supplement their input by absorbing the nutrients from the carcasses of their insect prey.

The cobra lily is endemic to Northern California and Southern Oregon. Based on map by Noah Elhardt.

By adopting this alternative method of nutrition, the cobra lily is able to thrive in habitats that might otherwise be hostile to plant growth. The plant’s unusual affinity for frigid water and hot sun also make it a poor choice for carnivorous plant enthusiasts hoping to keep a cobra lily at home, since the plant’s preferred habitat is extremely difficult to recreate. Cobra lilies also receive federal protection in Butterfly Valley Botanical Area, so taking one home is not permitted. Those interested in growing carnivorous plants can check out Rice’s book, Growing Carnivorous Plants, or make a visit to California Carnivores, a carnivorous plant shop in Sebastopol, CA.

While carnivorous plants seem exotic, North America is actually home to lots of predatory plants.

“Many people think that carnivorous plants are only found in the tropics,” said Rice. “They don’t know that North America’s a hotspot for carnivorous plants. These Darlingtonia, for example, are only found in California and Oregon. The Venus flytrap is from North and South Carolina. So we have a lot of impressive carnivorous plant biodiversity in the United States.”

]]>http://blogs.kqed.org/science/video/predatory-plant-lure-of-the-cobra-lily/feed/040.0068358 -120.961621840.0068358-120.9616218Butterfly ValleyButterfly Valley, located Plumas Nationa Forest, is one of the only protected Cobra lily habitats. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQED.fly under hoodThe cobra lily uses nectar to lure insects into its pitcher traps. Photo by Phi Tran.Ant03 croppedThe entrance to the cobra lily's pitcher trap is curled inwards making it easy for insects to enter, but difficult for them to find the exit once inside. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQED.Cobra lily fenestrationsTransparent windows called fenestrations confuse trapped insects. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQEDCobra lily (Darlingtonia californica) DistributionThe cobra lily is endemic to Northern California and Southern Oregon. Based on map by Noah Elhardt.Cobra-GIF-05-15fpsZomBees: Flight of the Living Deadhttp://blogs.kqed.org/science/video/zombees-flight-of-the-living-dead/
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/video/zombees-flight-of-the-living-dead/#commentsThu, 31 Oct 2013 16:00:17 +0000http://blogs.kqed.org/science/?post_type=videos&p=10241

Professor John Hafernik of San Francisco State University doesn’t leave home without an empty vial in his pocket. Entomology isn’t just a job; it’s a way of life, and Hafernik never knows when he’ll come across an interesting specimen during his daily travels. It was this personal habit that led to his accidental discovery that Bay Area bees were falling victim to an insidious insect, a parasitic fly that would come to be known as the “Zombie fly”.

A female Phorid fly injects her eggs between the armored plates on a honeybee’s abdomen. Christopher Quock/SFSU

In the school’s entomology museum, Hafernik lifts up a vial full of dead bees surrounded by tiny brown pupae. “This is the stuff of horror movies,” he said, “with maggots eating the insides out of these bees. Altering their behavior, perhaps, and causing their ultimate destruction.”

“I made this discovery entirely by accident, walking into the biology building on the San Francisco State campus one morning. I noticed that there were honey bees in front of the building that were on the ground, behaving strangely, walking around in circles.” Hafernik scooped up a few of the honeybees to feed a praying mantis that he was keeping in his office as a pet. “I put them on my desk and forgot about them. When I came back in a week or so and looked at it, that vial was filled with just a large number of these little brown fly pupae. And that’s when I knew that those bees were parasitized.”

A female Zombie fly (A. borealis). Photo by Jessica Andrieux/SFSU

Originally described in the boreal forests of Maine, this Phorid fly, Apocephalon borealis, is distributed over virtually all of the United States and Canada. “It’s a very small fly, smaller than a fruit fly. It’s the kind of fly that most people would not notice, even entomologists often don’t notice these flies,” said Hafernik. But despite their diminutive size, A. borealis can have a catastrophic effect on the host organisms that they parasitize. The female fly is equipped with a specialized ova-depositor, a needle-like stinger that she uses to inject her eggs into the abdomen of a hapless insect host. The eggs hatch and the juvenile larvae, or maggots, feed on their living host from the inside. At some point, the host insect dies and the larvae escape their host’s carcass, often through a weak spot in the neck, emerging like the monster in the movie “Alien.”

“Bees that fly away at night basically are on a flight of the living dead. They’re not coming back.”

While this fly has traditionally made use of native bumblebees and paper wasps as hosts, it has begun making use of the European honeybee — a foreign species brought to California by ship. “My graduate students and I, Andy Core and Jonathan Ivers, have been sampling honey bee colonies in collaboration with bee keepers around the San Francisco Bay Area. And what we’ve found is that almost 80 percent of the hives that we’ve worked with are infected or have been infected by this fly. So it’s a very common phenomenon in this part of the world.”

“The bees that are parasitized essentially get bee insomnia. They leave their hives at night, which is a really bad time for honey bees to be leaving their hives. Bees that fly away at night basically are on a flight of the living dead. They’re not coming back,” said Hafernik. While on their nocturnal outings, parasitized honeybees also seem to be compelled to seek out light sources. This behavior differentiates them from healthy bees who do not typically show interest in lights at night.

SFSU graduate student Chris Quock outfits captive honeybees with tiny radio frequency chips that allow him to monitor the nocturnal behavior of bees infected by the A. borealis parasite. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQED

In order to begin the pursuit of a future cure or treatment for the parasite infection, researchers must first determine what is happening to the honeybees. While SFSU graduate students like Chris Quock study the day and nighttime behavior of infected bees, Hafernik has set up a citizen scientist project in order to analyze the locations where A. borealis has switched to parasitizing honeybees. ZomBee Watch provides instructions of finding, collecting and identifying parasitized honeybees using a nighttime light trap. Participants can then upload their findings to the ZomBee Watch website, where Hafernik is able to map the phenomenon and look for trends.

Professor John Hafernik of SFSU inspects a honeybee that may have been parasitized by A. borealis. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQED.

The plight of honeybees is of particular importance to humans. “If we lost the bees, we’d end up having to change our diet, because we rely on honey bees for pollinating many of the crops that we put on our table.” Hafernik added, “Most of the fruits and vegetables that we eat are bee pollinated. Bees really are our best friends.”

Call them pumas, mountain lions, cougars, panthers, or any other of their various monikers; the sight of one of these full-grown cats staring down at you from a nearby tree is undeniably exhilarating. As ambush predators, pumas are professional hiders, and even regular visitors to puma habitat will likely go their entire lives without ever catching sight of North America’s largest cat.

GPS tracking collars shed light into the mysterious lifestyles of this apex predator. Photo by Paul Houghtailing, Santa Cruz Puma Project. Click on image to see a larger size.

On a beautiful summer day, we had the opportunity to follow Field Biologist Paul Houghtaling of the Santa Cruz Puma Project (SCPP) as he searched the rough back roads of the CEMEX Redwoods Property in Davenport, CA. Lead by Chris Wilmers, an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at University of California Santa Cruz, the team has gained renown for their work tracking the big cats in the Santa Cruz Mountains, as well as some high profile captures of pumas that ventured too close to human habitations.

As an apex predator in our Northern California region, mountain lions have huge home ranges. While mother pumas will remain in one area to raise their kittens, pumas generally patrol their territories without making use of any den or other home base. Paul informed us that female mountain lions tend to set their ranges depending on prey availability, which in the Santa Cruz Mountains tends to be deer. Adult males create their home ranges to include female mountain lions and exclude other males. The remaining young male pumas are forced to disperse and seek new territories, and it is often these individuals that get into trouble with humans.

Paul Houghtaling and Pilot Mark Dedon secure radio antennas used to upload GPS and accelerometer data from the collared pumas. Photo by Josh Cassidy/KQED. Click on image to see a larger size.

As we made our way through the redwoods, Paul occasionally slowed and peered out through the side window of the truck, surveying the dust that accumulates in the inside of the curves of the dirt roads. Traveling pumas rarely obey traffic rules, and tend to cut corners when walking along roads. Paul searched there for footprints and other telltale mountain lion signs.

The team employs several other techniques to determine if lions are in the area. This includes laying out road-killed deer with GPS tags in areas thought to be big cat territory. If a hungry lion moves the deer, the GPS tag sends an email to the team, who then head out to investigate.

After a few hours of searching, Dan’s voice finally crackled over the radio. His dogs had tracked and treed an adult puma.

Once pumas reach adulthood, they live solitary lives, but still need to communicate with each other. One of the main ways they do so is by making ‘scrapes.’ Pumas, particularly adult males, will dig small holes and then urinate on the pile of loose soil created by the digging. Other pumas that frequent the area can interpret the chemical signal to gather information about the cat’s identity and reproductive status based on the signature proteins left behind. Pumas tend to make scrapes in the same areas over time, making it easier for other pumas (and intrepid field biologists) to find learn about which lions are in the area. The research team sets up camera traps in these areas in order to document which cats are have taken up residence in the area.

Dan Tichenor, from California Houndsmen for Conservation and his best dog, Osage, a Plott Hound.

Paul had memorized the location of several scrapes in the area, and part of his normal search routine is to stop by these areas and look for fresh activity. As he searched, he would regularly make attempts to hail Dan Tichenor, a volunteer from California Houndsmen for Conservation, by radio. Dan had been on the property since before dawn with his pack of specially-bred and -trained hunting dogs. In this mountainous terrain, the radios were unreliable at best, and cell phones were of no use. After a few hours of searching, Dan’s voice finally crackled over the radio. His dogs had tracked and treed an adult puma.

In June of 2013, puma 38F gave birth to a litter of three kittens. Photo by Paul Houghtaling/Santa Cruz Puma Project

We hightailed it to Dan’s location, where Paul was able to capture the puma using a tranquilizer dart fired from a rifle. From the ground, the puma resembled a male lion that had been seen in the area, but when the team got the cat on the ground, it was obvious that this cat, dubbed 38F, was a female. Months later, Paul found 38F again, but this time she was not alone. She had given birth to three healthy kittens. The Santa Cruz Puma Project aims to track these kittens’ location and behavior for their entire lives to learn more about how they use their habitat and how their behavior changes when they come close to human dwellings.

Mountain lion populations had declined substantially in the California before they were protected from in the 1970’s. Before that time, hunters were offered a bounty for each puma killed. Since hunting pumas was outlawed, their population has rebounded. Today, they face a new problem. Humans have developed large areas of the Santa Cruz Mountains, building homes, farms and roads in the historical puma habitat. This has lead to an increase in conflicts between humans and the big cats, with pumas often finding themselves on the losing end. Today, the biggest threats to pumas include car strikes, and are targeted by citizens who seek depredation licenses to rid their property of pumas deemed problematic.

A new bill, signed into law last week by Governor Jerry Brown will have a substantial effect on California pumas. The bill, SB132 proposed by State Senator Jerry Hill (D.) requires that nonlethal procedures be used to remove any mountain lion that has not been “designated as an imminent threat to public health and safety.” It also authorizes the California Department of Fish and Game to partner with other groups, such as the Santa Cruz Puma Project, to carry out the non-lethal removal of pumas that find themselves too close to humans. With luck, this new bill will make it easier for humans and mountain lions to coexist as their territories continue to overlap.

Tejal Desai is a bioengineering professor at UC San Francisco who is investigating new treatments for diabetes. Using nanotechnology, she is developing a tiny capsule that contains pancreatic cells that produce insulin. This capsule would be implanted in a patient’s body and act as an artificial pancreas. In high school, Desai wasn’t sure what career path to pursue. As a freshman, she participated in a National Science Foundation program focused on engaging girls in science where she met a lot of inspirational women, including a biotech engineer. She says the topic appealed to her because “engineering could have direct health applications and help people.”